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Tracking down the memories of anti-apartheid writer and editor Sylvester Stein for Lapham’s Quarterly. “Even before dementia’s onset, Stein felt mocked by the fallibility of memory, which exacerbated the creative toll that exile already takes. Decades earlier, he brooded over the fate of his friend Gerard Sekoto, a painter who continued to churn out portraits of […]

For the Guardian’s Paperback Writer series, I write about my strategies for overcoming gaps and biases in the government archives that document indenture: “The stealing of the voices of indentured women, born into the wrong class, race and gender to write themselves into history, was structural. How could I write about women whose very existence the official […]

An essay for The Virginia Quarterly Review: “For both artist and migrant, ships are symbols of the universal. A slave, an indentured servant, a tourist, a seaman, a refugee obviously each inhabit a ship distinctly, but aboard, each is ultimately at the mercy of the sea. I share Locke’s instinct for seeking comrades in the […]

With support from the Pulitzer Center for Crisis Reporting, I produced a package of stories on the long-lasting effects of U.S. Cold War intervention on politics in Guyana, a former British colony on the northeastern shoulder of South America. Risker, Risk The Caribbean Review of Books, July 2015 ¤ CIA Meddling, Race Riots and a Phantom […]

The spring issue of Dissent Magazine, devoted to migration, carries my essay “Postcards from Empire.” The piece dissects Victorian-era photographs of Indian women used on postcards to sell images of the Caribbean as a tourist paradise: “Several of the ‘coolie belles,’ for instance, appear to be wearing the same flowered orhni or veil draped over their heads and […]

I review Rafia Zakaria’s memoir in Ms. Magazine’s Winter 2015 issue: “The Upstairs Wife revises an old conceit—at least as old as Plato—in telling the story of a nation-state: justice (or lack thereof) in the philosopher’s ideal Republic is reflected in the souls of its individual citizens. A nearer example is Salman Rushdie’s novel Midnight’s […]

A review essay for the July 7-14, 2014 issue of The Nation: The way women navigated the boundary between the home and the world was a question with great resonance and imaginative significance for India’s anti-colonial struggle during the first half of the twentieth century. (The title that Rabindranath Tagore gave his 1916 novel about a […]

By Gaiutra Bahadur | Published in History Today Volume: 64 Issue: 1 2014 On March 22nd, 1869 a young plantation manager in the West Indies wrote an expansive letter to his sister in Essex. Often Henry Bullock only managed to scribble perfunctory notes to his family, but this letter probably satisfied their hunger for details about […]